Green Room

Houston to Uber: Stop asking citizens to contact city officials

Regardless of the legitimacy or lack thereof of Uber’s issues with the city of Houston, it’s difficult to think of a more clueless way for the city attorney to respond than with a cease-and-desist order … because too many people are contacting city officials through e-mail accounts used for official city business. Uber delightedly posted the demand on its website:

Robert – Please consider this as a formal demand that your client, Uber, cease and desist from transmitting or aiding in the transmission of form e-mails to City officials regarding the adoption of an ordinance to accommodate their enterprise. Despite my informal request to you by telephone on Monday, the excessive number of e-mails has gone unabated, to the point that it has become harassing in nature and arguably unlawful. Failure to cease and desist will be met with appropriate action by the City.

David M. Feldman
City Attorney
City of Houston

Which Houston office-holders specifically are tired of hearing from their constituents? Mayor Annise Parker, who’s been in city government for almost half of her adult life? Someone had to tell Feldman to send this tone-deaf demand to Uber, after all. Houstonians might be interested to know which of their politicians are far too busy to deal with voter feedback.

Here’s a thought: why not just change all of the e-mail addresses, or hide them from the public? Congress does that, forcing constituents to communicate through its website. Making that change might create a political kerfuffle, but it’s a lot smarter than sending cease-and-desist demands to people with business before the city government.

Comments

Far be it from me to defend Houston, for anything. And I have no problem with Uber.

However, how do we know any of those emails were from constituents?

It seems that this could more likely be another case of cyber bullying by internet dweebs, world wide, with nothing better to do.

And Uber could get their point across without this tactic. It would make me think of reasons to not accede to Uber if I was part of the government in Houston (shudders at the thought).

Though, only a complete idiot would ever be in Houston without their own means of getting out of Houston very quickly. Preferably south, or north, on I-45. And if you ain’t already outside of 610 hum the Eagles “Hotel California”. Cause you ain’t gettin’ out.

If you do call, please explain that you are calling about the Uber issue instead of e-mailing because you heard that the City Attorney was warning Uber to stop encouraging people to send e-mails, so you decided since the city government wasn’t reading its e-mails, you felt it necessary to contact them by telephone – to make sure they know how you feel about the issue.

And remember — call only if you live in Houston or the surrounding area.

I somewhat agree with the C&D if the emails were truely automated form emails.

It’s one thing to post the email link and ask people to send a personal email in support of something. Is entirely another to provide them with an input form and automatically send the same email over and over again.

From the about page of Uber they list their investors: Goldman Sachs, Google Ventures, Menlo, First Round Capital, Lowercase Capital, and finally Benchmark. The rah rah, power to the people, democracy vs fascism, peasants vs rulers hyperventilating is puzzling for what seems like just some innovative astroturfing campaign for these vested business interests which are aiming for deregulation of the Houston taxi/limo industry. Modifying it for their own enrichment/business venture. A business venture already looking shady. But what do you really expect from the likes of Goldman Sachs?

Sadly though, it is good for business if you can dupe enough constituents in your targeted area to badger their elected officials into allowing your business model to out-compete the current area businesses. But either way its still fascism when a government can write and rewrite the rules for whomever they want to succeed or fail, at will(for “the people” or not).

That being said, it looks like this David M. Feldman bit down on the bait hard. What a putz.

What about non Houston residents that fly in and out of the city frequently for business?!?

Well, in that case you are in the same position I am every time I fly through Atlanta, LAX, or JFK — a sheep to be shorn. If you cannot vote them out of office, they really don’t care. In fact, they are likely to do the opposite of what someone from outside the area urges them to do because they have to restrain their urges when dealing with their constituents.

That’s actually one good reason Congress set up its system the way it has. It requires a zip code entry, IIRC, on its form. Presumably zips outside of a district or state are ignored.

Ed Morrissey on February 27, 2014 at 2:33 PM

There’s one problem with this system. It doesn’t stop congressmen from outside my district from sending ME emails. I just got one from a congressman in another state. Granted it was one of those blast emails asking for me to call my own congressman, but I wanted to respond directly to the politician who saw fit to attach his name to it. Can’t be done.